Gregoriou (Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas, Greece) and Braiman (a physicist at Syracuse U., US) have asked their contributors - specialists in the use of the Raman effect for characterizing polymers and biological systems - to address selected areas of interest in applications of infrared and Raman techniques. The resulting eight chapters discuss studying the viscoelastic behavior of liquid crystalline polyurethanes using static and dynamic Fourier transform-infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, stress/strain measurements in fibers and composites using Raman spectroscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy of ultrathin materials, two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy of biological and polymeric materials, Raman and mid- infrared microspectroscopic imaging, vibrational circular dichroism of biopolymers, membrane receptor-ligand interactions probed by attenuated total reflectance infrared difference spectroscopy, and step-scan time-resolved FT-IR spectroscopy of biopolymers.